Truth and Technology

Truth and Technology

JPI 981
3 Credits

The advent of modern science and technological society generated not only a new method for ascertaining the truth of nature, but new conceptions of nature, reason, and truth. This seminar will consider the ‘fate of truth’ in the light of this transformation. Reflecting philosophically and theologically on the meaning and history of truth, we will take special care to consider how a mechanistic ontology alters our understanding of truth, the means of attaining it, and our desire to seek it. Reading for the course will draw from such thinkers as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, von Balthasar, Ratzinger, Descartes, Bacon, Locke, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, James, Dewey, and Heidegger.

Selected Texts

Faculty

Michael Hanby portrait

Michael Hanby

Associate Professor of Religion and Philosophy of Science

Dr. Hanby is author of No God, No Science?: Theology, Cosmology, Biology (Wiley-Blackwell 2013) which reassesses the relationship between the doctrine of creation, Darwinian evolutionary biology, and science more generally. He is also author of Augustine and Modernity (Routledge 2003).

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